Philadelphia Eagles Blog - Go Iggles

January 02, 2008

Eagles Had Hardest Schedule

It's funny, every year when the NFL schedule comes out, there are a million articles written about which teams have the hardest schedule based on the previous year's results. Given how much turnover happens every year in the NFL, these articles are all meaningless within about five minutes of being written.

So it's somewhat interesting to notice at this point that the Eagles -- playing in a division with three playoff teams -- had the league's toughest schedule, based on opponents' overall winning percentage.

If you subtract out the wins each team provided to its opponents (e.g. for the Eagles, 144-112 minus 8-8 equals 136 wins) you see that the Eagles still played the toughest schedule. Their opponents won 56.7 percent of their games played against teams other than the Eagles.

Don't feel too bad for the Cleveland Browns missing the playoffs. They played the league's third-easiest adjusted schedule, against opponents who won only 43.3 percent of their other games.

Seattle, which at 41.7 percent had the league's easiest schedule, continues to reap the benefits of playing in the crummy NFC West.

Finally, the Cowboys (51.7 percent) played the easiest schedule of the four NFC East teams.

Comments

Eagles Had Hardest Schedule

It's funny, every year when the NFL schedule comes out, there are a million articles written about which teams have the hardest schedule based on the previous year's results. Given how much turnover happens every year in the NFL, these articles are all meaningless within about five minutes of being written.

So it's somewhat interesting to notice at this point that the Eagles -- playing in a division with three playoff teams -- had the league's toughest schedule, based on opponents' overall winning percentage.

If you subtract out the wins each team provided to its opponents (e.g. for the Eagles, 144-112 minus 8-8 equals 136 wins) you see that the Eagles still played the toughest schedule. Their opponents won 56.7 percent of their games played against teams other than the Eagles.

Don't feel too bad for the Cleveland Browns missing the playoffs. They played the league's third-easiest adjusted schedule, against opponents who won only 43.3 percent of their other games.

Seattle, which at 41.7 percent had the league's easiest schedule, continues to reap the benefits of playing in the crummy NFC West.

Finally, the Cowboys (51.7 percent) played the easiest schedule of the four NFC East teams.